"The first stage of sleep is incidentally the deepest one, from which a person
is less likely to be awoken. Rapid eye movement corresponds to this stage, and
the dreams, though not often remembered, are deep and durable. When dreams are
remembered at this point, it has been recorded that while dreaming one can regain
complete and perfect consciousness within the environment of the dream, meaning
that he is completely aware of himself and completely aware of the dream. If
the dream is durable enough, meaning that it is happening during the REM stage,
while the dreamer is aware of the fact that what he sees is a dream, he may
also be aware of the fact that often there are really no distinguishing qualities
between the dream and his waking reality as he remembers it. He will feel awake,
he will be able to control his movements and actions within the framework of
his dream, he will be able to carefully examine the details of the dream, retaining
meanwhile the capacity of judgement that permits him to compare a virtual orange,
for example, to a real one, and conclude in the end, in some dreams, that there
is no discernable difference.

"Since a dream can realistically reproduce the sensation of self awareness
we say that dreams are not necessarily abstractions or modelations- they can
produce and reproduce an infinite number of parameters, so as to appear spontaneous
even to an absolutely conscious and self-aware dreamer.

"The typical dream retold by a fascinated sleeper, full of complex plot developments
and changes of scenery, realizations, series of causes and effects, at best lasts
only a couple of seconds. Note the rapid speed of thoughts at the few instances
before a person is about to drift into unconsciousness- when he is still aware
and able to vaguely observe the growing incoherent thoughts that sprout from each
other so quickly (at an accelerating speed) that the logical cause (which, contrary
to belief, does actually exist) seems invisible. Thoughts stacked one on top of
the other seem to a half sleeping mind a compexly developing scheme- the moment
he regains his alertness he realizes those thoughts were stacked within the limit
of a millisecond, and really not several thoughts, but a single image."

The broadcast was mirroring something I could not trace. The radio box was
then as generic as I had predicted, having once learned this from my neighbor,
but that made it even more seemingly impossible to hope for finding out where
it came from. I knew that things that were around long enough to grow into the
dust they collected, so that it calcified, were always forgotten, because at
some point they never changed. But that was another story, one that occurred
to me every time I watched the box but did not listen to it, and I didn't want
to get carried away by that. Because every time I wrote my paper, there were
infinite layers of superficiality, one shining through the other, each one easily
pierced but always revealing another beneath it.

There was a mysteriousness about my work because it seemed that everything
I touched was not only ethereal, but layered as well, and stranger than that
even, every web site I handled, its deep hues and banners were of a substance
I had sensed before, but could not remember, like the borrowings of another
space that I was always trying to attain either through certain windows or inaccessible
images. Those windows that I saw on daily walks seemed just as immaterial, their
texture the same coded hypertext, and that was what made them so familiar. But
the sphere they were part of, situated somewhere between that which I could
remember and that which I could not (because no matter how I theorized, I was
convinced that what I did not remember still happened, and that was all that
could explain material thoughts with no origin).

(c)The little machine was so cheap that it didn't even have a tape recorder,
otherwise I would have recorded those bits of propaganda, whose source I couldn't
really trace. It was already past midnight on a Tuesday, and I had written one
line on my old computer, stared at it for half an hour, and then erased it.
I couldn't even remember what the line consisted of. I knew at one point that
I really was trying to look at my hypothesis, whatever it was, from a linguistic
point of view, and even carefully reread Sainsbury's examples of semantic paradoxes,
but I kept losing my train of thought as though it was one of those images that
I had probably never seen, but which I was reminded of nonetheless each time
I passed the balconied apartment windows of the tall buildings of the Washington
Square Village complex on Bleeker. So for now, at least, whatever linguistic
point of view I was trying to make myself remember by reading Chomsky was thought
by another person, and not accessible to me.